GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Getting Out While We Can

Iraq continues its long downward spiral into chaos, death count
rising faster than the desert mercury.

The news today -- 50 hostages seized from Iraqi Higher Education
Ministry by masked gunmen masquerading as Interior Ministry
commandos, the Iraqi police apparently complicit -- is horrific,
unbelievable. Yet is seems almost familiar in its way, as if we've
heard it before.

And we have, in so many permutations, in beheadings and
kidnappings, roadside bombings and mosque attacks.

Three and a half years now into this ugly war and Iraq is in
flames and American troops, ostensibly the best in the world, are
helpless to stop the madness.

For too long too many were unwilling to admit this, unwilling to
admit that the decision by an American president and his
administration to send troops into a country that had not attacked
us, a country with little capacity to defend itself and to send those
troops in on the cheap could only result in a deadly blowback that
will be with us for years and years to come.

Because, make no mistake, the forces that have been unleashed in
the desert, the hatreds we have sown, the enmity we have engendered,
will not go a away for a long, long time.

I am no expert on this, of course, just the editor of a pair of
suburban weekly newspapers who watches the news and reads the paper,
the headlines daily screaming of death and kidnapping and the
occasional, but all-too-infrequent moments of kindness and joy.

I write this a week after an election in which American voters
spoke out about this madness, chasing a Republican majority that has
walked in lock-step behind the president and his administration for
three-plus years. I write this having listened to voters in the towns
my papers cover, upscale voters and working stiffs, offer comments
similar to those I read in the national papers.

A small sampling (from The Cranbury Press):

 "Change is the only thing we can hope for to do anything."
-- Steve Quidor, Jamesburg.

 "The Iraq War is taking a terrible toll on the country and
on the people that are serving there admirably. It is time for a
change and staying the course with the Bush administration is
absolutely foolhardy." -- Sid Hausner, Monroe.

 "I've got to get rid of the Republicans, mostly because of
the war in Iraq. Needless, needless -- poor boys who were killed and
maimed for nothing, absolutely nothing." -- Charlotte Rubin,
Monroe

Admittedly, these votes were cast in a blue county in a blue
state, but they differ very little from the sentiments being voiced
around the country, where 30 or so Republicans were chased from the
House of Representatives.

The national news media is painting this as a win for
conservatives -- Democrats have moved to the right to win -- and
there is some truth to this on some issues. But the key issue was
Iraq and Republican control of Congress and it is why GOP moderates
were whisked away in states like Vermont and Connecticut.

And it is why we have been hearing a new tune from Bush and his
neocon allies (some, like Richard Perle, jumped ship before the
election). The president is now open to new ideas, but not a
timetable -- something needed to extricate the United States from
this mess.

There are no good options. But leaving and allowing the United
Nations and the regional powers (with a significant monetary
contribution from us) to come in and clean up the mess we created is
the least-worst option available.

There is just no reason to keep American troops in Iraq, where
they are both targets for insurgents and symbols of an American
arrogance that, in the words of the British journalist Robert Fisk,
has many Arabs desiring "another kind of freedom -- freedom from
us."

This arrogance &endash;- the sense that we are the indispensable
nation -&endash; underpinned so many of the assumptions made by the
Bush administration and its followers, assumptions that were wrong.
We were not treated as liberators and our "exceptionalism" was seen
as the new brand of colonialism that it was -- even if we did take
down one of the most thuggish dictators of recent times.

So, as I said, we have to get out of Iraq as soon as we can. And
we need to admit that there are limits to our own influence if we
hope to avoid another debacle in the future.

Hank Kalet is a poet and managing editor of two central New
Jersey weekly newspapers: the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury
Press. Email grassroots@pacpub.com. His blog, Channel Surfing, can be
found at www.kaletblog.com.